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Topic structures in Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Xu Liejiong  and
D. Terence Langendoen
Xu Liejiong
Affiliation:
Fudan University, Shanghai
D. Terence Langendoen
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College & CUNY Graduate Center
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Abstract

This paper systematically considers the full range of topic structures in Chinese. Such structures are syntactically characterized by the rule schema S' → X {S, S‘}, where X, the topic, is any major category, and S or S’, the comment, is another topic structure or a sentence which is independently well-formed. Some constituent of the comment, or the comment as a whole, must be related to the topic. If the related constituent is an empty category, it is interpreted not as a variable bound by the topic, but as a pro-form whose antecedent is the topic.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , March 1985 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We thank Robert Fiengo for his help at a time when this investigation was at a critical stage, and two reviewers for Lg., Tim Stowell and James Huang, whose suggestions have led to substantial improvements. We regret that we learned too late of Huang 1984, which raises important questions of fact and theory relating to this investigation. We thank William Baxter for his help with the romanization, and the teachers and graduate students of the Departments of Chinese and of Foreign Languages, Fudan University, for their help in testing the acceptability of the Chinese examples in this paper.

This work was supported in part by a grant from the PSC-CUNY Faculty Research Award Program (664336).

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